Former Meta VP of Global Clients and Agencies, David Dugan, announced yesterday that after his departure from Meta two weeks ago, he’s landed a new role.
Dugan wrote on LinkedIn yesterday, “Excited to announce that I’m joining OpenAI to lead the global advertising solutions team.” Read more. (March 23)
Specifically, his title is Head of Global Ads Solutions at OpenAI, a sales leadership role similar to his position at Meta.
Referencing the emerging ad model offered by ChatGPT, he continued on LinkedIn, “This is a brand new model that’s going to re-shape the industry, and I’m thrilled to be joining the ads team that’s building just that. I’ve been hugely impressed by the team at OpenAI, and joining a group of the world’s foremost experts that will bring new advertising solutions to the market.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Suzanne Vranica got the scoop and reported:
“[Mr. Dugan] will report to Brad Lightcap, the startup’s chief operating officer.
The high-profile hire underscores OpenAI’s urgent push to generate new revenue streams to support its enormous funding requirements for its extensive artificial-intelligence projects and computing needs. Earlier this year, the company began testing advertising on its popular free ChatGPT chatbot and the product’s less expensive subscription tier.”
Read: “OpenAI Taps Former Meta Executive to Lead Ad Push” (March 23) – The Wall Street Journal (subscription)
The WSJ’s Vranica cut to the chase in her article preview on LinkedIn saying: “Plenty rests [on] Dugan’s shoulders as ads will play a critical role in quest to generate essential revenue to fund the startup’s expensive AI projects and massive computing needs.”
In his LinkedIn post, Dugan closed by saying, “We’ll be scaling this team quickly, and looking for passionate talent who are ready to roll up sleeves and be central players in this critical moment in the industry. We’ll build the culture and experience together. Let’s go!”
OpenAI Careers shows no signs of ad sales roles — yet.
From tipsheet: Beyond a formidable Rolodex, Mr. Dugan brings over 12 years of ad sales experience at Meta during which he helped guide stratospheric growth in advertising revenue.
For OpenAI to reach out to seasoned leadership for a key sales role appears to be another sign of OpenAI taking its ad future seriously.
The ~300 comments and 3,000 likes on Dugan’s LinkedIn post appear to validate OpenAI’s choice.
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Developments
- Meta hires AI agent startup Dreamer’s team (March 23) – The Information (subscription)
- File storage in ChatGPT (March 23) – OpenAI
- Claude Cowork: Dispatch update and computer use (March 23) – Anthropic
CONNECTED TV
Magnite presents AI CTV tool at Google
Sell-side platform Magnite was presenting its AI-powered self-serve CTV advertising tool, streamr[dot]ai, at Google’s Spruce Goose Campus in Playa Vista, California yesterday.
According to streamr’s co-founder and, now, Magnite’s Head of Agentic Product, Jonathan Moffie on LinkedIn:
“Loved the brainstorming session on how we can push our Veo 3, Nano Banana, and Gemini integrations even further: unlocking more seamless CTV ad creation and activation through Magnite.”
See the post. (March 23)
From tipsheet: Magnite acquired streamr in September to “Unlock Small Business Advertising Spend for CTV Publishers.”
Interesting to see Magnite and Google collaborating. AI and CTV are making new bedfellows?
LLMs & CHATBOTS
Google brings Gemini, prompts to NewFronts
At the IAB’s NewFronts event taking place in New York City, Google was pitching its Gemini large language models (LLM) to digital ad buyers yesterday.
Bill Reardon, GM, Enterprise Platforms at Google broke down the “Gemini advantage” supporting his company’s marketing platform. He began with Google’s DV360 ad platform and said, “By supercharging Display & Video 360 with our latest Gemini models, our Marketplace now proactively curates media packages, delivering value before your ads even go live.” In short, AI will now help manage allocation of live broadcast inventory across connected TV.
Next up was the company’s AI workflow assistant known as Ads Advisor which was originally announced in November.
Reardon explained the “one prompt” Ads Advisor use case:
“We’re introducing Ads Advisor to help you move at the speed of your customers, providing support across every campaign stage:
Campaign set up: Upload your media plan and automatically translate it into a comprehensive campaign setup, coming soon with campaign builder.
Campaign optimization and monitoring: Track creative rejections and unlock insights to make your creative work harder to hit optimal spend.
Campaign reporting: Demonstrate current performance across line items with just one prompt. Coming soon, automatically create tailored dashboards with customizable metrics.”
Read: “Google NewFront 2026: introducing the Gemini advantage” (March 23) – Google Marketing Platform blog
AdExchanger’s Victoria McNally parsed Google’s NewFront AI news and noted that YouTube “is expanding its Creator Partnerships Hub (formerly BrandConnect and FameBit before that) to include a new Gemini-powered AI search function.” The AI component leverages natural language prompts. Read AdExchanger. (March 23)
You can sign up for the on-demand NewFront presentation by Google here.
More:
- “Google’s AI advisors: agentic tools to drive impact and insights” (November 12) – Dan Taylor, VP, Global Ads on the Google Ads & Commerce blog
- Ads Advisor (beta) – Google Ads Help
From tipsheet: The AI tool trend is enabling natural language in place of a complicated GUI.
SELL-SIDE
Monetizing SMB content with AI
A sell-side trade organization announced that it hopes to unlock a new line of revenue for SMB publishers.
Yesterday, News/Media Alliance (NMA), a “news media industry trade association representing around 2,200 news, magazine, and digital media organizations” announced a partnership with AI content marketplace operator Bria to let its members opt-in to an AI licensing agreement that would see them paid for content used in AI systems.
A press release explained:
“This partnership will also form the foundation for a new Bria product in development – designed to ensure reliable, grounded AI-generated outputs based on participating publishers’ owned content. For publishers, this opt-in content license agreement offers NMA members a revenue share system that provides a recurring revenue stream distributed based on the degree their content is used in Bria’s product deployed by its enterprise customers.”
More: News/Media Alliance Partners with Bria AI to Launch Industry-Leading AI Licensing Agreement (March 23) – press release
Digiday’s Sara Guaglione went deeper on “who” the AI clients are:
[Vered Horesh, Bria’s chief AI strategy officer,] said the company’s clients span enterprise AI teams, foundation model developers, copilot builders, agent orchestration platforms, and companies deploying AI in legal, financial services and healthcare industries. Bria and NMA declined to name specific clients, citing the fact that many of these internal AI systems or products are still in development and clients prefer not to publicly disclose the data sources behind them. The AI systems range from RAG pipelines, enterprise copilots, agent-based research and analysis, and search and answer engines, Horesh added.”
Read: “News/Media Alliance signs AI licensing deal to unlock recurring RAG revenue for small and mid-sized publishers” (March 23) – Digiday (subscription)
Digiday’s Guaglione emphasized the potential for enterprise demand using retrieval augmented generation (RAG). In other words, the future compensation for SMB content creators may not be the big LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) but businesses that use AI agents to deliver answers to their own customers.
COMMERCE MEDIA
Accenture investing in agentic commerce
Consulting firm Accenture Song announced a new partnership and investment (by Accenture Ventures) in commerce media platform, Davinci Commerce.
Although the size of the investment was not disclosed, Accenture and DaVinci stressed the “shift from traditional digital storefronts to AI-native, conversational brand experiences” as the reasoning behind the new partnership.
Quotes:
- Ndidi Oteh, CEO of Accenture Song, said in the release, “AI is rapidly reshaping how consumers engage with every brand. As people increasingly rely on AI-assisted recommendations and begin delegating decisions to intelligent agents – being discoverable is no longer enough. Brands must be relevant, personable, and ready to transact in agent-led environments. DaVinci Commerce enables exactly that.”
- Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of DaVinci Commerce said on LinkedIn, “The investment by Accenture and signing of a Global Partnership brings a wealth of global resources to ensure brands and retailers not only get an AI powered platform to engage consumers in this rapidly growing surface but also Accenture’s wealth of strategy, technology, domain, and technology integration expertise and services.”
Read:
- Accenture Invests in DaVinci Commerce to Advance Agentic AI-Led Shopping (March 23) – Accenture
- “DaVinci Commerce Announces Agentic BrandStore™ to Power AI Storefronts; Secures Strategic Financing and Global Partnership with Accenture” (March 23) – DaVinci Commerce
From tipsheet: You can see what DaVinci is fighting within its competitive set when it says in its own release, “DaVinci Commerce is purpose-built for AI-powered commerce, not a retrofit of SEO tools or prompt-layer tactics.”
PLATFORMS
Amazon talks MCP, ads at Paris event
“Over 700 advertising professionals gathered to explore how AI and the Amazon Ads Agent is transforming advertising workflows — from campaign planning to creative production to measurement.We announced the expansion of our Amazon Ads MCP Server tools to include AMC capabilities for the first time. Now any AI agent can instantly surface insights from saved AMC queries. Ask ‘Pull my top campaigns query for last month’ — and get the answer immediately.”
Read: “Unboxed Paris” (March 23) – Paula Despins, VP, Amazon Ads on LinkedIn
More: “IA agentique et full-funnel : Amazon Ads dévoile ses nouvelles solutions publicitaires” (March 18) – Minted
AGENCIES
Stagwell, AppLovin partner on performance
First announced on March 10, mobile advertising technology company AppLovin has partnered with agency holding company Stagwell. The agreement brings AppLovin’s AI-enabled Axon platform to Stagwell’s clients.
Stagwell CEO Mark Penn said at the time, “This partnership aligns with Stagwell’s broader focus on AI-powered marketing, pairing its performance-driven approach with AppLovin’s machine learning-driven platform.”
Read the release. (March 10)
Wall Street appears impressed with AppLovin. Financial site Insider Monkey reported yesterday that investment research firm “William Blair reiterated an Outperform rating on Applovin following an investor meeting. Top management reiterated that the company’s business trends remain strong and shrugged off pressure from competitors such as Meta Platforms.” Read more. (March 23)
AGENCIES
AppLovin video generation tool
On the Axon blog, AppLovin software engineer Brian Kelly announced the availability of a new AI-enabled “one-click” video ad creation tool. This comes on the heels of an interactive ads tool rolled out at the beginning of March.
In the post on Friday, Kelly shared several best practices:
“There are many things that must be done right in this process:
- Videos must be engaging and cohesive
- Product depictions, branding, messaging, and promotions must be accurate
- Editing must be high quality – including elements like captions and music
- Videos should exceed 30 seconds to take full advantage of Axon’s full-attention environment”
Video examples and a link to a signup page are provided for those who want to be a part of a testing phase.
More: Generating video with just your URL: A preview (March 20) – Axon blog
Yesterday, AppLovin growth marketer Raphael Vivas touted Kelly and the company’s new video generation tool on LinkedIn:
“Not sure what’s cooler:
1. Being able to generate high-quality UGC video ads with one click on Axon by AppLovin that can be run across all your ad platforms.
2. Brian Kelly building this feature from 0 to 1 and pushing it to production, even though he used to be an HR leader with zero engineering experience.
Whether you sign up for early access to the tool or not… try to be more like Brian Kelly…”
Read more on LinkedIn. (March 23)
Related: Automating creative to unlock scale (March 4) – Axon blog
BRANDS
Pepsi thinking about Performance Max
On the Think With Google blog, which promotes Google’s ads/marketing technology with marketers, Pepsi VP of Media, EMEA, Josep Hernández, adds his byline to a feature article on Pepsico AI strategy.
Hernández discussed how AI can analyze as well as facilitate ad campaigns with Google’s Performance Max platform:
“For example, trials with Lay’s in Spain have demonstrated the ability of AI-powered campaigns like Performance Max to connect the inspiration we generate on platforms (such as YouTube) with the final purchase action. The AI analyses thousands of signals in real time to determine where the user is most likely to convert at that exact moment, directing traffic to an e-commerce site or a physical store, depending on the customers’ needs.”
Read: “Inside PepsiCo’s 2026 AI ecosystem” (March 2026) – Think With Google
MORE
- Apple Is Set to Put Ads in Apple Maps in Services Push (March 23) – Bloomberg (subscription)
- “Upcoming changes to Lookalike user lists in the Google Ads API, starting April 30, 2026” (March 19) – Google Ads Developer blog
- How AI-generated content performs in Google Search: A 16-month experiment (March 23) – Search Engine Land
- What White House AI Policy Means For Advertisers (March 20) – MediaPost
- The Future of Digital 2026: Canada – Paul Briggs, analyst, eMarketer on LinkedIn